AMosquera Critique on Ontology

 The article is looking at the word ontology, which means the study of being, to understand Levinas, it is required to look at the history of ontology, beginning with Parmenides, the father of philosophy. He drew the distinction between appearance and reality, or the way things appear to our sense and the way they are in themselves. Parmenides presented ontology in a poem called “On Nature,” where the goddess Justice reveals the nature of truth, and how we say what is and what is not. She argues that change is an appearance, and not real because being is eternal, indivisible, and unchanging. Parmenides says that thought and being are the same because being is one and makes a unity with everything, including thought. Levinas disagrees with Parmenides because the difference between things cannot be subsumed under a basic concept of unity and instead exist in a multiple. The plurality of what exists is not just an appearance, but part of nature’s reality. Pluralism is evident in relation to the other person because they are different from each other. This leads to the adoption of Plato’s Sophist, who believed that true knowledge is eternal, indivisible, and unchanging, but is different from Parmenides on two points: the world of appearances, that we perceive with our senses, is considered to be imperfect and changing imitations of the true reality, meaning the world is not an illusion but occupies a middle ground between belief that implies a level of truth or a sheer illusion that implies complete falsity; in other words, we have not reached the level of true reality; and in Sophist, Plato distinguished between sense of not being, challenging Parmenidean. One of Plato’s characters shows that though not being cannot exist, it can still have relative existence in the sense that something can be other than something else, it emphasizes how the categories of being is same or other. The text continues to get more confusing by saying Levinas wants to find a category for the opposite of being, so it can designate the absolute other. I would like to point out that reading is not my learning style and all of this is just words living in my mind for a good two minutes. I feel like we did talk about this stuff in class, but I do not remember exactly. Either way this math is not math-ing.